Nobody deems any amount of radiation to be a safe dose. Instead, they work under a linear no-threshold model where 50 millirems each might cause 10 cancers in N million people exposed, while 200 millirems each will cause 40 cancers in the same population - absorbed dose is supposed to be directly proportional to harm in large groups of people.
There are suspicions that this is maybe too conservative, and that we have repair mechanisms for small quantities of radiation that don't exist for larger quantities, but this directly contradicts the establishment line on the matter, and would be impossible to ethically test.
Placing limits on workplace or general exposure would not represent "safety", but merely a threshold at which regulatory mechanisms kick in. Per http://www.nrc.gov/images/about-nrc/radiation/factoid2-lrg.g... , background dose aboveground is about 310mrem/yr, and we average about twice that when taking into account human activities (medical imaging and radon mostly, I would expect).
There are populated places on earth with high, naturally occurring background radiation, one such place is in Iran, what have been the long term health effects on people in places like that? I imagine studies have been done.
Have a read up on radiation hormesis. It looks like small doses might be beneficial. The linear no threshold model is all fine and good at high doses, but low down the data is poor. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15673519
As effect size goes down, statistically significant data gets harder and harder to collect and control effectively. We have tiny amounts of research funding, and even if we took in seven billion people as a dataset, there is some non-negligible dose below which this ceases to be statistically significant.
The actual EPA documentation[1] about this site shows that the comparative exposure is not nearly as significant as the article indicates. A handy comparative radiation dose table that they provide shows that you'd receive an additional 240 mR/year simply by moving from NYC to Denver, Colorado.[2] By comparison, the estimated annual dose received by a worker at the former Wolff-Alport site is 120 mR/year.
Is not related but is a curiosity, 'Los primos' (the cousins) is often translated colloquially as 'The fools' in spanish. When you fall in a very obvious scam you are a 'primo' or did 'el primo'.
But the best part is what is not said in the article. It seems that there is a licensed grocery selling sandwiches next to this garage... if your dream is to develop superpowers after sipping a coffe this would the place.
So aside from contamination, those sandwiches are likely slightly safer than from other places since the radiation in the area will help sanitise surfaces and foods.
My only concern would be if the water staff used to wash up was contaminated from the soil. But assuming the water is good the food is likely good too.
That said, GP's point is that unless there are radioactive substances flying in the air / otherwise contaminating the store next door, things bought there should be safe. They'll be irradiated (affected by radiation), but not radioactive themselves. Contrary to popular opinion, getting irradiated doesn't cause you to become radioactive.
> getting irradiated doesn't cause you to become radioactive.
Well, actually... Neutron activation and photodisintegration via high energy gamma rays can produce radioactive isotopes via irradiation.
But this generally requires a high flux or high energy to produce noticeable secondary radioactivity. So depending on the type and energy spectrum of the radiation the sandwich is exposed to it might pick up tiny tiny amounts of radioactivity.
But yeah, that's probably going to be drowned out by any kind of radioactive dust.
Indeed, the threat comes when the sandwich is radioactive - and even then, it depends on the personality of the person consuming it. Will he use his newfound powers for good or ill?
Except if prepared in a table seasoned with a salt of our special dust, courtesy of that place at 10 m that is so peculiar that if you want to rest for an entire night there you need to be... ehum... a beer tin or a cereal packet?.
This would be the place serving the best sparkling donuts in NY probably, and also having the laziest sanitary inspectors in the entire city.
A lot in Staten Island was once used to store uranium ore for the Manhattan Project. A recent survey found very high levels of radiological contamination.
One of Chicago's most upscale downtown neighborhoods is built on a thorium dump from the gaslight era. This is more than a little academic as Streeterville is currently being re-developed by Northwestern Hospital and the city has to be careful not to put more thorium in the air. There are something like four or five new buildings being built right now.
The fix? When radiation is detected, the soil is put in bags and shipped to a facility that can dispose of it. The land in the article is going to be park.
Probably politics and money. You'd have to go through an eminent ___domain process to condemn and buy up all that property, dig up and remove all the earth, underground utilities, etc. down to a depth of at least a few feet if not yards (in the process, probably spreading comtaminated dust all over the surrounding area) and then fill it in with clean earth.
The sheer volume of money and work and the technical difficulties of putting a 15cm thick sandwich of metal underneath a block make me doubt the veracity of the article.
Especially coupled with the factual error "separates into the rare-earth Sodium Sulfate". Sodium is nowhere near a rare-earth metal and Monazite is a Cerium/Lanthanium phosphate that contains lots of other elements, Uranium and Thorium among them.
I used to live about 3 blocks from here. Within a 2 block radius, there's a children's school, a popular outdoor bar, a hipster pizza restaurant, and some "artist lofts". It's likely that the residents and workers in the area don't have/didn't have knowledge of the former monazite sand site. With the NYC real estate market as it is, there are a bunch of areas with toxic sites like the Gowanus Canal that are people are moving to. http://gothamist.com/2015/07/30/brooklyn_hipster_havens_toxi...
Sodium sulfate is not a rare-earth. This looks to me like a case of copying from Wikipedia without understanding. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monazite#Acid_cracking
"leaving a solution of lanthanide sulfates from which the lanthanides could be easily precipitated as a double sodium sulfate"
This is an additional step that happens after the steps shown in the diagram, to separate the different lanthanides. Sodium sulfate is added to the mixed lanthanide sulfates, some of which form lanthanide-sodium double sulfates (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_salt) which precipitate out while other lanthanides remain in solution. See https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HPyNk-cU-nQC&pg=PA402&lp...